Known to the public as Lady Diana’s father, he was born as a distant relative of Henry VII, and attended Eton and Sandhurst before joining the ranks of the British Army. He married Diana’s mother Frances Ruth Roche in 1954 but they divorced when Diana was just 8-years-old.
Throughout his life, he would enjoy many other significant roles in his life, including as an equerry to George VI, and later, Queen Elizabeth II. In Andrew Morton’s biography, Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words, speaking of her father’s stroke, Diana said, ‘He was certainly a different person after.’
But the health scare didn’t slow the Earl down, delighting in public appearances with his daughter from the moment her engagement was announced in 1981. Photos from the happy day show him greeting crowds outside Buckingham Palace, wearing a red carnation pinned to a navy shirt.
A proud father, he reminisced about the moment Charles asked for Princess Diana’s hand in marriage. He revealed, ‘Charles said, ‘Can I marry your daughter? I have asked her, and very surprisingly she said yes. I told him, ‘well done’ and I was delighted for the two of them.’
After contracting pneumonia, he passed away in 1992, shortly after Princess Diana visited the family estate before going on a ski holiday in Lech.